Attack or Block? Repertoires of Digital Censorship in Autocracies

ABSTRACT

Online censorship has become a common feature in autocracies. Previous work has investigated different online censorship tactics such as website blocking or cyberattacks independently. In reality, however, autocratic governments rely on a repertoire of censorship techniques to control online communication, which they are likely to use depending on the respective political situation on the ground. In this article, we study the interplay of different online censorship techniques empirically. Focusing on new Internet measurement techniques and large existing datasets, we study the relationship between website blocking and cyberattacks (Denial-of-Service). Our results provide evidence that autocrats select tactics from their censorship repertoire depending on the current level of contention. During quiet times, we find some evidence that governments rely on different censorship tactics in parallel. In weeks with protest, however, website blocking is negatively associated with Denial-of-Service attacks against opposition websites. This shows that when the stakes are high, autocrats become more selective in their use of censorship.

KEYWORDS:

• Autocracy
• censorship
• denial of service
• cyberattack
• ICT

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The full list of categories can be found here: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/blob/master/lists/00-LEGEND-new_category_codes.csv

2. We provide a more detailed description of our method in the Appendix A1.

3. We select events where the ICEWS variable target sectors mentions at least one of the following: “Executive”, “Executive Office”, “Government”, “Government Major Party (In Government)”, “Ministry”, “Legislative / Parliamentary”, “Lower House”, “Municipal”, “Police”, “Upper House”, “Cabinet”, “Elite”, “Legislative / Parliamentary”, “Army”, “Military”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [402127652] and the National Science Foundation [CNS-1730661, CNS-1705024]

Notes on contributors

Lukas Kawerau

Lukas Kawerau (PhD, University of Konstanz) is an independent researcher. His research focuses on the intersection of governments and the Internet, with a particular eye towards issues of cybersecurity.

Nils B. Weidmann

Nils B. Weidmann (PhD, ETH Zurich) is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Politics and Public Administration and co-speaker of the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His research focuses on the analysis of democratic and non-democratic regimes in a comparative perspective, and the effect of modern information technology on political mobilization and violence.

Alberto Dainotti

Alberto Dainotti is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. His research is at the intersection of Internet measurement, data science and cybersecurity and largely focuses on understanding when and how Internet infrastructure can fail and proposing remedies.